Diversity Maximized World Map | Atlas Altera

[WheelyWheelyLegsNoFeely]

Yeah, that's similar to my line of thinking. I think Java, Sumatra, Iran etc. provide good examples of highly dense human populations living alongside megafauna and apex predators, even if the populations of those animals have become highly marginal and restricted to small pockets of areas. For the moas and elephant birds, I was thinking domestication due to the fact that the birds might not have a flight reflex to humans, and having the tweak that the Austronesians that discover the animals clue in quicker that herding the animals instead of striking them dead might be fruitful in the long run... For the saber tooths, I was hoping the Andes could help, and for the marsupials...well we have until colonialism to prove that they are viable, except Thylacoleo might need something...perhaps surviving in Cantabria (big Tasmania).

That all sounds really interesting! If you'd like any inspiration, @Worffan101 had a really good timeline a few years ago called Age of (near) Extinction detailing a lot of examples of OTL extinct species surviving. A lot of the posts are specifically about hominids like Neanderthals or Homo erectus surviving, which I feel would be a bit outside the scope of Atlas Altera, but there are also a lot of interesting pieces on other species surviving that you could possibly take inspiration from (with permission, of course).

More specifically, I'd be interested in seeing if any other major megafauna in South America or Australia (the OTL continent, not Kerguelen) survived due to how unique these biospheres were, and in Australia specifically I'd be interested in how the inland sea's impacted different biomes and different lifeforms.

One more note is how these different animals might impact local cultures. Even IOTL there's some level of cultural memory of extinct animals like mammoths in the myths of various peoples in Siberia and North America, so having these animals survive could lead to some very interesting cultural developments.

 

[Worffan101]

Yeah, that's similar to my line of thinking. I think Java, Sumatra, Iran etc. provide good examples of highly dense human populations living alongside megafauna and apex predators, even if the populations of those animals have become highly marginal and restricted to small pockets of areas. For the moas and elephant birds, I was thinking domestication due to the fact that the birds might not have a flight reflex to humans, and having the tweak that the Austronesians that discover the animals clue in quicker that herding the animals instead of striking them dead might be fruitful in the long run... For the saber tooths, I was hoping the Andes could help, and for the marsupials...well we have until colonialism to prove that they are viable, except Thylacoleo might need something...perhaps surviving in Cantabria (big Tasmania).

for NZ megafauna: could be as simple as the Maori starting to venerate some of the wildlife (Hieraeetus moorei is a likely option, ain't every day you see a 3 foot tall eagle) for whatever reason, or setting up a taboo system like their cousins in Hawaii did and declaring certain regions forbidden as a way to let stocks of megafauna stay up.

Sabertooths are harder, but when it comes to SA megafauna there was (like NA megafauna) a double whammy of humans showing up as the productivity of the ecosystem crashed due to decreasing diversity of plant life and a shift to less nutritious plants. That said, domestication of gomphotheres, if they survive the flora shift, is entirely possible. Imagine alt-Tawantinsuyu charging the Spanish on elephantback. We don't have many records of sabertooths in the Andes, but fossils almost never form IN mountainous regions.

Australian megafauna also had to deal with a shift in ecosystems. For the thylacine--it preferentially targeted ground birds, so keeping more of those around, especially Tasmanian emus, would be a huge help. For the drop-bear and the giant goanna it's a lot harder IMO because those were probably at least partially related to the same ecosystem shifts that put diprotodonts, giant wombats, and short-faced and predator kangaroos at risk.

Madagascar was a simple blitz. Very VERY hard to maintain populations of megafauna with any human pressure of significance on an island that size.

 

[Worffan101]

The extinction waves in human history have GENERALLY come in 3 waves

1. humans show up. Anything big with preexisting ecological pressure or vulnerability dies/is eaten. example: Columbian mammoth, moa.
2. white people show up. Anything that made it through wave 1 that has any vulnerability or is commercially important in some way dies. Example: Thylacine (accidental, primary victim was Tasmanian emus), dodo, Delalande's coua.
3. White people bring lots of invasive species. Anything vulnerable to invasive species dies. Example: Guam broadbill, Marianas crow, Guam kingfisher, Guam rail.

There's also incidentals, like the Wake Island rail (literally eaten out of existence by the IJA in WW2). Waves 1 and 2 can also overlap--it wasn't white people who wiped out the Easter Island palm or a lot of the Chatham Islands endemics, and bison made it through wave 1 only to almost die in wave 2.

We're also kinda hitting wave 4 right now where human encroachment, habitat modification, and associated impacts are reaching critical mas for a lot of species, and in some cases already have. E.g. the Yangtze river dolphin and paddlefish are gone because the PRC built a big dam. Straight up, one big project changed enough habitat that two species just vanished.

Keeping species alive means they need to run the gauntlet of "pre-gunpowder people show up", then "white people with guns and factories show up", then "rats, disease, and other invasives hit". That's not easy, unfortunately.

 

[Telamon Tabulicus]

The extinction waves in human history have GENERALLY come in 3 waves

1. humans show up. Anything big with preexisting ecological pressure or vulnerability dies/is eaten. example: Columbian mammoth, moa.
2. white people show up. Anything that made it through wave 1 that has any vulnerability or is commercially important in some way dies. Example: Thylacine (accidental, primary victim was Tasmanian emus), dodo, Delalande's coua.
3. White people bring lots of invasive species. Anything vulnerable to invasive species dies. Example: Guam broadbill, Marianas crow, Guam kingfisher, Guam rail.

There's also incidentals, like the Wake Island rail (literally eaten out of existence by the IJA in WW2). Waves 1 and 2 can also overlap--it wasn't white people who wiped out the Easter Island palm or a lot of the Chatham Islands endemics, and bison made it through wave 1 only to almost die in wave 2.

We're also kinda hitting wave 4 right now where human encroachment, habitat modification, and associated impacts are reaching critical mas for a lot of species, and in some cases already have. E.g. the Yangtze river dolphin and paddlefish are gone because the PRC built a big dam. Straight up, one big project changed enough habitat that two species just vanished.

Keeping species alive means they need to run the gauntlet of "pre-gunpowder people show up", then "white people with guns and factories show up", then "rats, disease, and other invasives hit". That's not easy, unfortunately.

Yeah. I totally get it. But there are still examples where megafauna did survive through these waves, like rhinos and tigers in Indonesia.

Number 4 is something that I think I would avoid with my unrealistic hindsight-afforded ideas of how industrialization could be channeled and applied in astute dosages...

Also, I think mountainous areas in Madagascar could help with wild populations of megafauna, but at the same time, domestication could be a solution.

 

[Worffan101]

Yeah. I totally get it. But there are still examples where megafauna did survive through these waves, like rhinos and tigers in Indonesia.

Number 4 is something that I think I would avoid with my unrealistic hindsight-afforded ideas of how industrialization could be channeled and applied in astute dosages...

Also, I think mountainous areas in Madagascar could help with wild populations of megafauna, but at the same time, domestication could be a solution.

The main thing there is that Madagascar is small, and there isn't as much economic pressure for a civilization to remain thalassocratic and bound to the coasts. The mountains aren't big enough and there isn't enough natural impetus for short-range maritime activity in the region. early Austronesian people in Indonesia had no real reason to muck around on a massive scale in the interior of Java, but when they reached Madagascar, there was much less pressure to stick to the coast--there weren't many big islands nearby, and there was only the one big nearby continent populated by very ethnically and culturally different people, the fishing wasn't as good, and the natural barriers to the interior weren't as high.

 

[WheelyWheelyLegsNoFeely]

Looking at the world map, it looks like there are a number of islands formed from a risen Mascarene Plate. Perhaps these make human migration to Madagascar more gradual and manage to give some of the local wildlife enough time to adapt to human pressure while not changing the general human history of the island too radically. This may not actually solve the problem, but that's my first thought as to how to maintain higher levels of megafauna in Madagascar.

Also, looking beyond Madagascar specifically, the prevalence of different islands ITTL would offer a lot of opportunities for new insular biospheres to develop.

 

[Griffin04]

Ah, thanks for your suggestions and comments. I appreciate it. I find it hard in general to pique people's curiosities on this forum so I'm always excited when someone comments here.

It's funny you should mention biodiversity. I'm just starting to clean up the biogeographic corner maps in the Chorographical Depictions map that I made a long while back (so the flora and fauna regional schemes...think Wallace). I hope to post the two maps as separate standalone pieces with more labels and less reliance of standalone legends, like in the corner maps of Chorographical Depictions. That said, the map would never get into detail of what species exist where, but could give big clues for what kind of species might exist in the alt-geo places in the southern hemisphere, for instance.

• I am hoping for more monotremes in ATL Australia and Siluria,
• as well as everyone's Thylacine,
• marsupial cougars
• moas
• and Haast eagles,
• as well as perhaps the elephant bird...
• sabre tooth tigers, on their last legs when Europeans arrive, are one of the world's first conservation victories in Argentina,
• heath hens are domesticated early by the Eastern Woodland Culture or the Norse in Windmark....
• the Avalon (Falkland) wolf persists... mammoths and whooly rhinos roam alongside muskox in a Pleistocene park / mammoth steppe areas in northeastern Siberea; if you look at the climate and terrain corner maps of the A Wealth of Nations map, you will see I especially made changes to OTL data to show the mammoth steppe, actually.

All really unbelievable but also just slightly possible...

And yes, I have in the near future bucket list the task of doing simple democratic index maps (Wiki-style) and regime types too!

This is really fascinating, I love alternate ecology and extinct megafauna. One suggestion, the quagga, a relative of the zebra native to South Africa which was driven to extinction OTL in the 19th century, was reported by one naturalist who observed them to be 'unquestionably best calculated for domestication, both as regards strength and docility,' and were reported to be tamer and more docile in captivity than zebras, would be an interesting animal to see domesticated in that region ITTL. (I'm reminded of the zorse, which seems to be a domesticated zebra-relative, in the A Song of Ice and Fire series.)

 

[Telamon Tabulicus]

This is really fascinating, I love alternate ecology and extinct megafauna. One suggestion, the quagga, a relative of the zebra native to South Africa which was driven to extinction OTL in the 19th century, was reported by one naturalist who observed them to be 'unquestionably best calculated for domestication, both as regards strength and docility,' and were reported to be tamer and more docile in captivity than zebras, would be an interesting animal to see domesticated in that region ITTL. (I'm reminded of the zorse, which seems to be a domesticated zebra-relative, in the A Song of Ice and Fire series.)

Ah, yes, I have the quagga in my lore too. I forgot to mention it. I especially love the fact that the quagga and donkey were native to two different halves of the African savanna biome. Quaggas could then be domesticated early on in ATL by peoples in what I call Azanea (southeast Africa).

 

[Telamon Tabulicus]

The Regional Cultures or America
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For a higher resolution version, go to my Deviantart.
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The United States of America consists of regional cultures. The main regions are the north and the south, or what is colloquially referred to as Yankeeland and Dixieland.

In the north, there is further a breakdown of the cultural region of New England or simply the Northeast (Nahucksetts , Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Conneticut), New Holland or just the East (Long Island, Raritane, Delaware, Wyoming), Sweetwater or the Northwest (Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois), Tallgrass or the Midwest (Iowa, Osage, Kansas, Nebraska), and the Ranges or the West (Montana, Nevada, Pradera). In the South, there is Bluegrass or the Mideast (Allegheny, Kentucky, Tennessy, Appalachy), Tidewater or the Southeast (Virginia, Regina, Mariana), Sloughpine or the Southwest (Louisiana, Arkansaw, Ozark), and Cottonwise or the Deep South (Carolina, Georgia, and Jacobina). As part of an extension of the Spanish Main, extending from the Escambe over to the Atlantic, Florida stands on its own as a cultural outlier and is sometimes referred to as simply the Peninsula. Read some dense lore in the comment thread I posted for the Reddit version.

 

[Telamon Tabulicus]

Zoogeography of Altera
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For a higher resolution version, go to my Deviantart.​

This is a biogeography map we did for Atlas Altera. It is an ode to maps made by Alfred Russel Wallace and his infamous Wallace Line between Borneo and Sulawesi. This one is a map on faunal distribution patterns in the world of Altera, or zoogeography. You will find that some of the hierarchical geographical levels of analysis differ from Wallace's. My schema is a balance of qualitative and quantitative territorial groupings informed by Holt et al.'s mapping of phytogenetic turnover for each birds, amphibians, and mammals, as well as Schmidt-Wallace's original provinces, which privileged mammals.

@WheelyWheelyLegsNoFeely @Worffan101 @Griffin04 ... finally here.

 

[Worffan101]

This is beautifully detailed, but I'm wondering about the reasoning behind a couple of major regions.

1. Why the partial split of the gradient region in Central America and Mexico? Is that similar reasoning to the partial split of Wallacea in Indonesia?
2. This seems very similar structurally to the map from that Discover magazine article you linked, but this world has much greater amounts of inland water, including a massive finger of the Arctic Ocean covering much of Siberia. Would that not massively alter the biogeography of this world?

This is leaving aside of course that biogeographic realms can be charitably described as fuzzy on a good day.

 

[Telamon Tabulicus]

This is beautifully detailed, but I'm wondering about the reasoning behind a couple of major regions.

1. Why the partial split of the gradient region in Central America and Mexico? Is that similar reasoning to the partial split of Wallacea in Indonesia?
2. This seems very similar structurally to the map from that Discover magazine article you linked, but this world has much greater amounts of inland water, including a massive finger of the Arctic Ocean covering much of Siberia. Would that not massively alter the biogeography of this world?

This is leaving aside of course that biogeographic realms can be charitably described as fuzzy on a good day.

VERY FUZZY indeed. I have some comments in my footnotes, which I'll put out on Patreon next week, but the Black Sea (finger in the Arctic) and Chandara Sea (finger in Tamirea/OTL Australia) seem to not be major issues. For the latter, consider how the Bosporus does not make major changes, nor do the Red and Caspian Seas in OTL seem to make major obstacles to terrestrial fauna distribution. The Hudson Bay is a good analogue to the black Sea but the Black Sea's southern coast is going to be warmer, I reckon (see my climate map in the corner of the political map).

The split in Central America and Mexico is based on my sources (Holt et al.) I believe.

 

[Neoteros]

Zoogeography of Altera
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View attachment 812837

For a higher resolution version, go to my Deviantart.​

This is a biogeography map we did for Atlas Altera. It is an ode to maps made by Alfred Russel Wallace and his infamous Wallace Line between Borneo and Sulawesi. This one is a map on faunal distribution patterns in the world of Altera, or zoogeography. You will find that some of the hierarchical geographical levels of analysis differ from Wallace's. My schema is a balance of qualitative and quantitative territorial groupings informed by Holt et al.'s mapping of phytogenetic turnover for each birds, amphibians, and mammals, as well as Schmidt-Wallace's original provinces, which privileged mammals.

@WheelyWheelyLegsNoFeely @Worffan101 @Griffin04 ... finally here.

The Cetecic realm, now that's a place whose fauna and flora might look very funky.

Any small mammals with weird nasal features anywhere in the South Pacific?

 

[Telamon Tabulicus]

The Cetecic realm, now that's a place whose fauna and flora might look very funky.

Any small mammals with weird nasal features anywhere in the South Pacific?

What are you referring to with the weird nasal features? Sorry, that reference went by my head!

 

[Neoteros]

What are you referring to with the weird nasal features? Sorry, that reference went by my head!

These odd critters - one of the first ever speculative biology projects ever. That said, even though they were made up by an actual zoologist, I don't know if any mammal could've have ever become that odd; still, in a world where the platypus is a thing, anything is possible.

 

[Telamon Tabulicus]

These odd critters - one of the first ever speculative biology projects ever. That said, even though they were made up by an actual zoologist, I don't know if any mammal could've have ever become that odd; still, in a world where the platypus is a thing, anything is possible.

Ah! I think someone did mention this before! It would be certainly great to have them... Either in Rekohua (Big Chathams) or ATL Australia or Siluria. Just need to figure out which lineage they'd come from in evolution...

 

[Griffin04]

I could see them being marsupials, monotremes, or even surviving multituberculates.

 

[WotanArgead]

I could see them being marsupials, monotremes, or even surviving multituberculates.

Unlikely - they disappeared at the end of the Eocene. While some species may be evolving in Asia, there is evidence that they have better resisted placental pressure in that region.

 

[Telamon Tabulicus]

Ming Dynasty Timeline
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For a high resolution view, go to my Deviantart.​

To see other and more serious maps from the project, go to AtlasAltera.com or r/atlasaltera or go to the Altera Deviantart page. You can also take a deep dive on Youtube.com/@atlasaltera

 

[Neoteros]

Ming Dynasty Timeline
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View attachment 816105

For a high resolution view, go to my Deviantart.​

To see other and more serious maps from the project, go to AtlasAltera.com or r/atlasaltera or go to the Altera Deviantart page. You can also take a deep dive on Youtube.com/@atlasaltera

Wait, wasn't southern China home to quite a few independent countries, rather than to the KMT, or did that happen after 1998?